2026-03-08 18:06:01
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Addie Citchens reads her story “The City Is a Graveyard,” from the March 16, 2026, issue of the magazine. Citchens is a Mississippi Delta-born, New Orleans-based writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, “Dominion,” was published in 2025 and was short-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
2026-03-08 18:06:01
In November, 2024, on the day of the U.S. Presidential election, Tim Whitmarsh landed in Beijing, jet-lagged and disoriented. It was the middle of the academic term at the University of Cambridge, where Whitmarsh holds the Regius Professorship in Greek. He had been flown business class halfway around the world and put up at a five-star hotel for what he had been told would be the first World Conference of Classics. What followed, he later wrote, was “the strangest and most momentous” event of his academic career.
By eight o’clock the next morning, Whitmarsh was north of Beijing at the palatial Yanqi Lake international convention center. The venue, reportedly part of an almost six-billion-dollar construction project, had previously hosted the APEC summit. Whitmarsh was ushered into a side room with distinguished guests, among them Lina Mendoni, the Greek minister of culture. The presiding politician was one of Xi Jinping’s closest confidants: China’s propaganda chief, Li Shulei. Li shook hands with Whitmarsh and exchanged platitudes with the other guests. It wasn’t until Whitmarsh had been herded into the main hall that he grasped what he’d signed up for: “a geopolitical event, not an intellectual one,” as he put it, with hosts including Greece and China’s ministries of culture.
Inside a conference hall roughly the size of a football field sat hundreds of people—ambassadors, politicians, and scholars. At the podium, Li read out a letter from Xi, which described ancient Greece and China as two civilizations that have shaped humanity’s development from opposite sides of Eurasia. Xi went on to encourage their cultural exchange and announced the establishment of a Chinese School of Classical Studies in Athens.
Whitmarsh, who, with other Western-trained scholars, had led a group called the Postclassicisms Collective, realized that he had prepared the wrong speech. In the years since Donald Trump entered politics, emboldening fascists and white supremacists who held rallies deploying Roman imagery, Whitmarsh and the others had come to repudiate a traditional view of their field that he summed up as the “passing of a baton, down through the ages from like-minded person to like-minded person.” When it came time for Whitmarsh to speak, he argued that ancient texts didn’t spring from some timeless ur-culture, and that they should not be treated as such. “ ‘Classical Greece,’ ” he said to the Chinese and Greek dignitaries, is “an invention of the classical Greeks themselves.”
When we met for drinks two months later, Whitmarsh wondered whether he might have accidentally offered a warning for China: “Maybe it was the right speech after all,” he told me.
The World Conference of Classics had all the signs of a typical political spectacle, intended to cultivate appreciation for Chinese culture abroad. Yet Li and other scholars—many of whom can recall a time when their own intellectual traditions were denounced by Mao Zedong as “feudal dross”—also expressed admiration for the Western classics. One keynote at the conference was delivered by Liu Xiaofeng, one of the most prolific translators of ancient Greek thought into Chinese, and the gathering’s official theme was about “mutual learning.” The enthusiasm, in China, for Western classics also comes from below. In the years before Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to “aggressively” revoke Chinese student visas, nearly three hundred thousand Chinese enrolled at U.S. universities each year. Thousands learned ancient Greek and Latin. Many returning Chinese scholars brought their Western training and methodologies back to the Chinese academy, prompting university officials to find ways to categorize—and make use of—their skills.
Even as foreign textbooks are banned and news broadcasts portray Western societies as gun-toting hellscapes, Chinese universities are hiring Greco-Roman classicists. One Beijing university recently completed a new translation of Plato. Another university established a research center, led by an Oxford professor, that puts ancient Chinese texts in conversation with other classical textual traditions, including Greek and Latin. The reason for the classics fervor varies depending on whom you ask, but most scholars agree that Chinese officials tend to see the Western classics as a complement to their politics. In recent years, Xi has made “cultural confidence” a cornerstone of national policy, referring to pride in Chinese traditions and values. Across China, archeological museums and exhibitions are multiplying, and neglected villages are being refurbished into stage-set “ancient” towns. At universities, the study of ancient Chinese texts has historically been scattered across disciplines; now, under government direction, universities are trying to gather that scholarship in new classics departments where, one theory goes, ancient truths can be nurtured and passed down. In 2024, Renmin University, in Beijing, became the first university in China to offer an undergraduate major in Chinese classical studies. Last March, Sichuan University opened a classics department, aiming to educate students to be “conversant in both Chinese and Western learning.” “When China looks at the world, they want to be like Greece,” Martin Kern, a Princeton Sinologist and keynote speaker at the World Conference of Classics, told me. “Greece is for Europe what China is for East Asia. You guys have Socrates. We have Confucius.”
By now, it is almost a cliché to say that the Western classics are in crisis. During the past half dozen years, around ten universities and colleges have closed their classics departments or programs, with some folded into larger humanities units. Western classicists look to the classics revival in China with a mix of awe, envy, and hesitation: a geopolitical rival could very well value their discipline more than their home institutions. In 2023, Shadi Bartsch, a classicist at the University of Chicago, covered the cresting interest among Chinese intellectuals, in ancient Greek and Roman texts, in “Plato Goes to China.” From late Qing reformers inspired by Athenian citizenship to nationalists who draw on Plato to bolster China’s political ideology, Bartsch shows how supple ancient texts are in the hands of interpreters. Yet she also acknowledged the upsides of a foreign government’s support for her field. “There is real interest in the question of whether China is going to become the main protector of the western classics,” she told me over e-mail.
When I heard that China was hosting a lavish event with esteemed foreign classicists, I was curious: Who had orchestrated this? The story, according to several scholars I spoke to, begins in 2021, when Chinese and Greek education officials started setting up research centers—one in China and one in Greece—aimed at deepening understanding of the two ancient civilizations. In February, 2023, as Greek administrators prepared to celebrate the opening of a center in Athens, they received an unusual suggestion from the local Chinese Embassy: write a letter to Xi Jinping. One administrator told me that he was baffled, but that the embassy staff seemed confident that something would come of it.
The inaugural ceremony for the so-called Center of Greek and Chinese Ancient Civilizations was attended by Sun Chunlan, a Chinese Vice-Premier at the time. Sun brought with her a reply letter from Xi Jinping congratulating the Greek scholars on the center’s opening. In the following weeks, Chinese media visited the center to report on how its then president had been honored by Xi’s reply. “Glittering at each other, from each end of the Eurasian continent,” Xi had written, China and Greece should work together to promote mutual learning. The letter codified the idea that the modern West—defined by liberalism, constitutionalism, and multi-party democracy—could be separated, conceptually, from the ancient West, as represented by Greece and Rome. In China’s civilization-building cause, the former was an ideological adversary; the latter could become an ally.
With Xi’s approval, momentum built quickly. One of the Chinese ministries involved in the joint centers helped organize the World Conference of Classics. They tapped China’s top academic institutions—Peking University, Renmin University, and Tsinghua University, among others—to draw up guest lists, and the universities relied in part on Western-educated faculty to send out the invitations. One of the invited professors, Jonathan Ready, of the University of Michigan, recalled feeling as taken aback as Whitmarsh. He had also flown business class, and had been squired to the front of the assembly for reasons he could not explain. “It was the most lavish conference I have ever, and will ever, go to,” he told me.
Ready had been invited by a former student named He Yanxiao, whom he had taught at Indiana University, and who eventually went on to a postdoc at Tsinghua University. In December, 2024, I met up with Yanxiao for dinner in Beijing. A lanky bespectacled man in his early thirties, Yanxiao recalled that his interest in classics began during his freshman year of high school, when he encountered a Chinese translation of the Odyssey. Like a true Marxist, he told me, he was searching for references to slavery, but he kept getting distracted by the tale. “I just found it so beautiful,” he said. He resolved to teach himself ancient Greek. Few resources existed for Chinese to study Greek at the time, but a new pair of introductory textbooks had been published recently by Liu Xiaofeng, the prolific translator.
Liu was then a philosophy professor at Sun Yat-sen University in southern China, where he taught ancient Greek and Latin. He has since produced or edited several hundred translated works and interpretations. He is best known in the West, however, for his popular writings on the philosopher Leo Strauss, in the early two-thousands, which sparked what the Chinese media dubbed “Strauss fever.” In the years following Deng Xiaoping’s turn toward a capitalist economy, some Chinese intellectuals felt a kind of spiritual malaise; Deng’s reforms had failed to provide moral direction for a vast and proud former empire. Liu began to understand China’s aimlessness in the language of Strauss, who famously argued that Western civilization had strayed from its ideals of “Jerusalem and Athens.” (“How could I be so close to this person?” Liu once wrote.) Liu proposed that the aim of Chinese intellectuals should be to “rebuild the spirit of Chinese traditional civilization,” by studying the ancient texts of the West. It was no accident, Liu wrote, that Western superpowers once schooled their future leaders in ancient Greek and Latin. China, Liu concluded, needed a classics department.
Until recently, Liu was a noisy member of the Chinese intelligentsia, with little influence in politics. But, with Xi Jinping’s endorsement of the classics, Liu’s Straussian ideas have percolated into the upper echelons of the Party. In 2024, three of Liu’s protégés entered a newly established classics research office at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a state think tank with close ties to policymakers, multiple Chinese classicists told me. They became integral players in the organization of the World Conference of Classics.
Yanxiao devoted himself to mastering the Confucian classics, and he eventually looked to study abroad, transferring, as a college junior, to Indiana University. There, Yanxiao began to realize how particular Liu’s approach to antiquity was. Classics historiography, which Yanxiao was learning at Indiana, makes you “function like a detective.” “You want to see how history is narrated, so you collect all kinds of evidence,” he told me. For Liu, by contrast, the study of the classics seemed almost subservient to a process of cultural empowerment. In a 2015 article, ten foreign-educated Chinese scholars were interviewed on how to institutionalize classics in China. Among the points they seemed to agree on was their wish to distance themselves from Liu’s approach. “Westerners do not speak of ‘usefulness,’ ” Zhang Wei, of Fudan University, said. In the fall of 2016, Yanxiao entered the Ph.D. program in ancient history at the University of Chicago. Soon after, classics became increasingly embroiled in America’s culture wars. White nationalists at Charlottesville marched hoisting Roman flags, and far-right internet personalities adopted Roman pseudonyms. A field beset by declining enrollments faced a reckoning over its role—complicity, even—in the ideologies of Western superiority that animated white supremacists. These tensions came to the fore in 2019, during an annual meeting, in San Diego, of the Society for Classical Studies. (It happened to be Yanxiao’s first time at the conference.) At a panel titled “The Future of Classics,” a Princeton historian of Rome named Dan-el Padilla Peralta presented data showcasing the underrepresentation of Black and minority authors in top classics journals. During the Q. & A., an independent scholar named Mary Frances Williams stood up to challenge the panelists. “Maybe we should start defending our discipline,” she said. The classics, after all, were the foundation of Western ideals like liberty, democracy, and freedom. Williams went on to say to Padilla Peralta, “You may have got your job because you’re Black, but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.” He replied that he wanted nothing to do with the vision of classics that Williams had outlined. “I hope the field dies,” he said. “And that it dies as swiftly as possible.”
For many classicists, the “incident,” as they now call it, made clear that a selective vision of the field had undermined the authority of scholars from marginal communities. “Our field was, like, What are we doing?” Christopher Waldo, an Asian American classicist at the University of Washington, recalled. “There’s not just one thing that Greco-Roman antiquity signifies.” That year, Waldo created the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus, which promotes the study of how Asian and Asian American cultures have interpreted antiquity. Other affinity groups, including Trans in Classics and CripAntiquity, started congregating around the same time. Padilla Peralta described the aims of like-minded scholars as “de-centering Greece and Rome as the primary or main locus of intellectual innovation.”
For some Chinese scholars, who turned to the Greco-Roman classics for the perceived wisdom and cultural capital it conferred, the focus on marginalized voices in antiquity was grating. In 2021, an anonymous Chinese doctoral student in the United States published an article that circulated widely among Chinese classics students, bemoaning the “absurd reality of American academia.” The author blamed Padilla Peralta for stoking a culture of denunciations, using terms that evoked the Cultural Revolution. A commenter on the article made the link more succinctly: “Down with Confucius, burn the Pantheon—different formula, familiar flavor.”
Yanxiao told me that, in his first few years at the University of Chicago, he had not thought of himself as Asian. “I used to think we were all academics huddled in the ivory tower working toward one intellectual pursuit,” he told me. Yanxiao broke from that view in 2019, when he spent a year as an exchange student at the University of California, Berkeley. Later, he began reading academic work on K-pop. Scholars such as the ethnomusicologist Michael Fuhr saw K-pop as a reversal of long-standing narratives, especially in pop music, that accentuated the flow of culture from West to East. It was an alluring idea for Yanxiao, who was raised in an environment shaped by the reception, and rejection, of Western ideas. K-pop scholarship, Yanxiao said, “shocked him” into embracing his Asian identity.
In the enlarged vision of the classics slowly taking shape in the American academy, Yanxiao has found an intellectual foothold. He studies interactions between the eastern half of the Roman Empire and East Asia, and sheds light on how popular art forms were often misunderstood by their ancient critics. In the fall of 2024, he flew to Princeton, where he delivered a lecture on Roman pantomime, a dance form that once dominated theatres across the Mediterranean. Comparing élite Roman accounts that dismissed pantomime as a vulgar import from the East with the way K-pop had been received by some Anglophone critics, Yanxiao reframed pantomime as a transformative hybrid of “East” and “West”—between the Empire’s eastern provinces and Rome—rather than a corrupt derivative. Padilla Peralta, who attended the lecture, called the paper “spectacular.” Yanxiao had proved, Padilla Peralta told me, that people of diverse backgrounds, and the “interventions” they brought to the field, led to a “richening of the historical fabric, not to its impoverishment.”
When the pandemic broke out, in 2020, Yanxiao returned to China to write his dissertation. He hardly recognized the country. Electronic payment methods had become almost universal. Futuristic cafés and boba parlors dotted major cities. The progress didn’t seem to extend to the academy, however. In the fall of 2023, Yanxiao joined Tsinghua University, where his research confused professors who were accustomed to more conventional disciplinary lines. “People at Tsinghua wondered whether my interest in K-pop was a sign that I was intellectually unserious,” Yanxiao told me.
Yanxiao worked to bridge China’s more conservative academy with the post-classicist current in the West. After the Society for Classical Studies published a special issue on race and racism following George Floyd’s murder, he conducted an interview with one of the issue’s editors for the Shanghai Review of Books. In 2020, the University of California, Berkeley, renamed its classics department “Ancient Greek and Roman Studies.” Yanxiao interviewed the Berkeley professor James Porter about the reasons behind the change. Porter, who, with Tim Whitmarsh, was a member of the Postclassicisms Collective, suggested to Yanxiao that, as Chinese scholars develop their own classics field, they need not repeat the West’s problems. They could start with “post-classicism” and “work backwards,” he said.
In the Western academy, the study of antiquity has moved toward a more fractious, intercultural vision of the past. Yanxiao feels that Chinese classics must make similar accommodations, incorporating different perspectives on culture and class, to remain globally relevant. Straussianism, Yanxiao feared, would “isolate Chinese classics” from his fellow-practitioners in the United States and Europe.
In this mission, Yanxiao has found allies, like Jinyu Liu, a professor of Roman history at Emory University, in Atlanta. Around 2014, Liu began bringing American classicists on lecture tours through Chinese universities. She hosts exchanges between Chinese and American classicists, and has created an online, peer-reviewed database with Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, that works on Chinese translations of Greek and Latin texts. “We’re revolutionizing the way Chinese learn Greek and Latin,” Liu said. In 2017, Martin Kern, the Princeton professor, co-founded the International Center for the Study of Ancient Text Cultures, at Renmin University, with an early China scholar named Xu Jianwei. They invite scholars of various antiquities—Greece, Rome, Mesopotamia, Israel, India, Japan, Egypt, and the Arab world—to present findings in their respective fields. “You realize many of the problems you encounter also exist in other classical traditions,” Xu told me. During one session in August, 2024, Xu discussed a theory as to why educators in ancient China preferred oral recitation as a way to teach: winters in the north were so frigid that basic tools like ink and brushes would freeze. Xu recalled the excitement of some of his interlocutors, including the Western classicist Glenn Most. “He said ‘I never thought of that!’ ” Xu told me with a smile. Questions about the weather’s impact on philological practice, Most thought, could be asked of ancient Greece as well.
Yanxiao had mixed feelings about the World Conference of Classics. A part of him felt immense pride when Xi Jinping’s letter was being read out. “This really niche thing I’ve been pursuing since high school got such mainstream attention,” Yanxiao told me. “So many foreign scholars realized that China was investing heavily in classics—something they couldn’t imagine in their own countries.” To be a classicist in Xi’s China was to operate with a halo usually reserved for scientists and engineers. For Yanxiao and other classics scholars, this will translate into more job openings, conferences, and opportunities to publish and lecture. But everything he had learned in America made him chafe at the conference’s emphasis on timeless wisdom. As Whitmarsh put it in the Times Literary Supplement last January, in an article recounting his experience at the conference, “We were enjoined to celebrate diversity and respect between nations—or at least two of them—but not within them.”
Last year, I accompanied Yanxiao to the annual Society for Classical Studies conference, held at a Marriott in downtown Philadelphia. Paper titles included “Queer Spaces in Pompeii?,” “Ecofeminist Narratives in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” and “Ocean Vuong, Allusion, and the Limits of Interpretation.” Defenders of the new classics—with its incorporation of race, gender, pop culture, and comparative frameworks—see it as a more faithful representation of antiquity itself. “When you study the classics,” Whitmarsh told me, coherence is an illusion. “It’s more like a disorganized mash that we try to piece together.”
Yanxiao had prepared a talk on the Xiongnu Empire, a formidable power that occupied some lands north of Han Dynasty China. As he stepped up to the lectern, the monitors flashed an image of the first slide: it was a scene from the movie “Crazy Rich Asians.” Yanxiao began to recount the story of Eleanor Young, played by the actress Michelle Yeoh, who arrives at a grand London hotel with her family in the nineteen-nineties. She is turned away by the hotel staff, who, unaware that she is the new owner, claim they are “fully booked” and suggest she try “Chinatown.” On the next slide, Yanxiao shared a list of rejections he’d received from classics journals, along with the reviewer’s comments. “If I have Chinese material or say something about my ethnicity, the reviewers suggest that the research should belong in Sinology journals,” he said. “That’s what I call Chinatown Classics.”
Returning to the core of his talk, Yanxiao likened the Xiongnu’s impact on the West to that of the Mongols, who, a millennium later, would alter the cultural topology of Eurasia. To grasp this piece of Roman history, Yanxiao argued, one had to study the Xiongnu—and to understand the Xiongnu, one had to read Chinese.
On the last day of the conference, I had coffee with Yanxiao at the Marriott lobby. The conversation turned to the future, and I asked him which country he saw himself settling in. Applying for jobs in China was difficult, Yanxiao told me, because his research still bewilders some scholars, who thought he’d been “brainwashed by American gender-and-identity politics.” Still, he had come to appreciate the convenience and comfort of life in China—its high-speed rail, e-payments, and ultra-fast delivery systems.
Outside the hotel, the snow had turned into sleet. Yanxiao had just returned from a stroll through the Philly streets, where the cityscape made him feel alienated, he told me. The typical American city was not as comforting to him as a typical Chinese one. At the Marriott, though, a sunny, more sociable side of Yanxiao seemed to come out. Friends waved him over, and younger Chinese scholars sought his attention. Among classicists, Yanxiao told me, he “felt totally at home.” ♦
2026-03-08 18:06:01
Since 1979, Iran’s revolutionary regime has been the nemesis of eight American Presidents. None could tame its political furies; its covert operations, which killed more than a thousand Americans in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan; or its expansion, through the creation of like-minded extremist movements, across the Middle East. The Islamic Republic considered its mini-realm a defensive buffer against U.S. and Israeli intervention. The U.S. and Israel viewed Iran as the most persistent threat in the world’s most volatile region. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have now set out to destroy the regime, militarily and politically, in a reckless war of choice with no visible or thoughtful endgame—and, in Trump’s case, no advance approval by Congress or warning to American taxpayers.
For Operation Epic Fury, the Trump Administration has so far deployed nearly half the United States’ air power and roughly a third of its naval assets. The cost is nearly nine hundred million dollars a day, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated. Much like the initial “shock and awe” campaign during Operation Iraqi Freedom, in 2003, the first week of the war was militarily stunning. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and dozens of senior officials were killed. Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles was seriously depleted and its strategic installations left in rubble. Its navy was devastated; a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean, the first such strike since the Second World War. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, boasted, “More and larger waves are coming. We are just getting started.” Iran’s capabilities, he added, are “evaporating.”
Trump, with his usual inconsistency, has called for Iranians to rise up against the ruthless theocracy—last week, he demanded its “unconditional surrender”—but also said that he’s prepared to deal with a new religious leader. Since 2017, millions of Iranians have participated in protests; tens of thousands have been killed. For now, though, an uprising seems unlikely. Iranians will first need to pick up the political and physical pieces of their lives, and although public fury at the government has not diminished, foreign military intervention has ignited a sense of millennia-old nationalism. The prospect of many members of the Iranian security forces—there are more than a million, counting reservists—joining a popular rebellion seems improbable, too.
The war has rattled the international order, troubled as it already was. After two disastrous U.S. wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is an ominous sense of how messy and costly and deadly this one might get, however confident Trump sounds. Iran is larger, in size and in population, than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It is arguably the most important geostrategic country in the three regions it borders—the Arab world; the formerly Soviet “stans” of Central Asia; and Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan, in South Asia. It has vast oil and gas reserves, along with the largest military in the Middle East, and it has had powerful sway in parts of the Muslim world, particularly among Shiites.
Trump said that the biggest surprise to him has been the scope of Tehran’s response. Iran was clearly prepared, especially after the Twelve-Day War, last June, when the President ordered B-2 stealth warplanes to drop bunker-busting bombs on nuclear facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. This time, it countered with missile and drone strikes on seven oil-rich neighbors allied with the United States, from Iraq to Saudi Arabia and Oman. It targeted international airports, hotels, businesses, ports, and energy facilities. Despite American defensive superiority, Iran hit the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh; the consulate in Dubai; the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East, at Al Udeid, in Qatar; and the U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, which coördinates U.S. naval operations across the Middle East. Netanyahu said that he has been dreaming for forty years about overthrowing the theocracy, but Iranian missiles penetrated Israel’s Iron Dome defenses. Air sirens repeatedly alerted the residents of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to seek shelter. Dozens of buildings, including a military airbase, were hit. Hezbollah, Iran’s longtime partner, opened a second front with Israel from Lebanon.
The scale of Iran’s retaliation has led U.S. allies, who had balked at joining a U.S.-led offensive, to reluctantly agree to play a role. France, Germany, and Britain pledged to “take steps to defend our interests and those of our allies in the region,” with Britain deploying warplanes in Qatar. Greece, following a drone strike on Cyprus, sent four fighter jets to the island. Italy promised defense systems to Gulf nations. By the end of the first week of war, seventeen countries were involved. After cutting direct military aid to Ukraine last year, Washington even reached out to Kyiv for its expertise in countering Iranian drones, which Russia uses to attack it.
Beyond the physical damage, Epic Fury has spooked the global economy. Stocks plunged, and the price of oil spiked by fifteen per cent, as Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes. Saudi Arabia temporarily shut its Ras Tanura oil refinery, one of the world’s largest, after a drone strike. Qatar suspended the production and export of liquefied natural gas.
Iran, then, still has some leverage. Hadi Semati, a former professor of political science at the University of Tehran, who is now in Washington, said, “If Iran comes out of this crisis alive, it has essentially won, albeit with degraded military capability.” And the theocracy may survive. Suzanne Maloney, an expert on Iran at the Brookings Institution, cautioned, “We’re going to be left with some kind of bloodied, battered rump version of the Islamic Republic, led by officials who are now even more determined to try to cling to power, and who are going to be more confident of the fact that they’re able to stay, because they have withstood this terrible crisis.”
Last week, as Iran’s Assembly of Experts met to elect a new Supreme Leader, Trump insisted that he should have the right of approval. He told Axios, “I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela.” He rejected Khamenei’s hawkish son Mojtaba as “unacceptable.” (Trump, Maloney said, “seems to think that this is an episode of ‘The Apprentice.’ ”) But the Assembly may select a revolutionary hard-liner to signal continuity. Iran’s ninety-two million people, in the meantime, are trapped between bloody war and the bloody regime. ♦
2026-03-08 18:06:01
It is late August, at the time of day when the air in New Orleans is heavy, hard to take in and harder to let out. You press through your jog, feeling as though there’s a cloud in your chest. You run to clear your mind and to keep your perimenopausal ass from sagging to the backs of your knees—not that you feel it’s effective for either purpose. By weaving around the tourists on Decatur and into an alley, you are able to find a bit of relief from the heat and the crowd. A melody floats from Jackson Square, halting you in your tracks. You know the song, but, hindered by the urgency of the guitar and the singer’s complicated arrangement, you struggle to name it. Then you are hit by another song, booming from a new performer and accompanied by the sound of his shopping cart rattling over the cobblestone street. You take the time to contemplate this tune as well, and, as you do so, the moisture that has been lurking just beneath your skin is forced through your pores, causing your eyes to sting and your T-shirt to cling to you. Although the heat has everyone dealing with some degree of dampness, sweating is often a source of violent embarrassment for you. You wipe your face with your T-shirt, look around to see whether anyone has noticed your discomfort, and spot a handsome young man watching you with the slightest of smiles. He discards some trash and moves in your direction with a sure stride.
He is, up close, even more striking. Gazes tangle, sound mutes, time bends. A handful of seconds ache like history. You soon realize that what you have read as flirtation is actually recognition. You know him, and he knows you from the inside out. His probable age fits the time line, and you’ve never seen that dark, rusty complexion on anyone but his father’s people. Something in the erect way he carries himself is yours, though, and also the mouth, which is saying something you don’t catch. His confidence is palpable, whereas his father was a poet whose hands trembled when he peeled you an orange or when he gripped his notebook while practicing the terrible spoken-word he was so passionate about.
Fear ruffles through you, then love, or maybe pride that this ball of cells you thought you’d flushed away forever in your dorm bathroom has miraculously persisted. Your son, who has passed you and continued on, aptly makes his way through one of those ghost-tour groups and disappears from view. Blurry-eyed, grappling, you find the nearest bench and sit before you crash. Your breath comes out in an abrupt burst, as you have been holding it—a habit that you’ve developed, according to your tarot reader, Kiki, because your birth chart is heavy on fire and earth placements, but no air. The man with the cart has rolled about his way, but the guitar in Jackson Square wails on, and still you cannot remember the name of the song.
But this comes back to you at once: the overwhelming uncertainty of being pregnant at nineteen, the fact that it had happened was a shock, even though you had been doing what it took for it to happen. The poet was poor and beautiful, tragically romantic in that classic November Scorpio fashion; he would have been useless. Your options were either to have the baby and struggle to pay for it and school in a place where you knew no one, or to return to your dusty home town and get hired on at the post office with your parents, who hadn’t wanted you to go to college at all, let alone in a city they likened to Gomorrah. You could have raised your kid, with their grudging help, until some country souse-belly divorcé came along to ask for your hand. You could have dished up his bacon and doled out his blood-pressure medicine; you could have lain patiently beneath him, bartering your body for validity, for security. You could have given him more babies, in addition to the two or three he already had. Maybe you’d have saved enough to go on vacation once a year.
You quickly decided that neither of those options would work for you. You had no abortion money, no savings of any sort, and the poet’s poverty further solidified your decision to do what you had to do. Your method was partly instinctual, partly gleaned from older girls from home, who had found themselves in trouble that way. Every morning, you fastened yourself into two girdles and one of those neoprene waistbands and ran, harder than you ever had in high-school track. Then you went to your job at the campus bookstore and lugged around the heaviest boxes you could find. You worked so hard you were named employee of the month. This was one thing you’d hold on to for the rest of your life, this hearty work ethic; whether it was at the odd jobs that put you through undergrad or the career-track work you did during your practitioner program, it was always a penance of sorts. On the day that you were honored at the bookstore, the supervisor rewarded you with a huge iced cookie while you were on break. You were trying to eat that super-sweet-ass cookie when the cramps started up. By the time you got off work, the spotting had begun, the shifting inside, and it gave you the same sparkly feeling you’d had the first time you were on a plane. You went to your evening class, even though you felt like you were going to die.
The bathroom (you used the one on the floor below your room) had a row of showers and a lone tub, which only the girls who didn’t know any better used. At least the water got hot. In the midnight hour, you drew the heavy, beige, odd-smelling curtain around the tub, eased yourself in, and attempted to soak away the ever-worsening cramps. Feverish, nauseated, you had to get out to puke up the cookie and something that tasted bitter, like aspirin. Alternating between the toilet and the tub, you were finally able to brace yourself in the stall until you felt the core of this thing pass through you. Afterward, you dragged yourself up the stairs and fell into bed.
The next day, the R.A.s called an emergency dorm meeting, which you accidentally attended after work. The topic was the blood in the second-floor bathroom, which Mrs. Val, the maintenance lady, had had to clean and disinfect. You were slipping right through the meeting to go upstairs when one of the R.A.s went, “Three-oh-four, could you stop and listen to this for a minute?” All eyes were on you; you felt certain they could see through your clothes to the evidence that was still flowing from you. But mostly you felt guilt for leaving a mess for Mrs. Val. You had just been tired as hell and sick as a dog, or you would have cleaned up after yourself.
Now you wonder whether your kid’s spirit hijacked the uterus of another woman. It could have been Mrs. Val, or maybe the poor girl who discovered the carnage. Or maybe the alley you’d just jogged down to get away from the tourists was a portal to another dimension, one in which you’d made less selfish choices—like the cephalopod you read about who broods her eggs for more than four years—and those words you hadn’t quite caught from your son were something like I’ll see you this evening, Mama. What you cooking? You are involved in a memory or a daydream in which you’re setting an elaborate Christmas table for your alternate-dimension family when the bulky shadow of some random guy falls over you, jolting you to your senses. You freeze.
“You O.K., ma’am?”
The words pluck your eardrums. Alarm turns to annoyance. One of the most irritating things your forties have brought is the unnecessary tendency for people to call you “ma’am.” When you don’t respond, the guy continues.
“I said, ‘This lady is much too beautiful to—’ ”
The word “lady” you hate even more than “ma’am.” You turn on your charge-nurse voice and say, “No, thank you.”
“I’ll leave you alone, then.”
“I sure appreciate that.”
Ten years ago or so, you were being dragged to a second line by a friend when you saw a set of twin girls in matching blue eyeglasses, holding hands and playing around. They had big bushes of hair and seemed weird in the way you were as a kid. You guessed that they were anywhere from seven to ten years old. Inexplicably, your eyes sought them out again and again in the ever-moving crowd. Watching them made you push back a pair of glasses that weren’t on your face, glasses you hadn’t worn since having Lasik years earlier. Your mind blurted out, Those could be me and John Doe’s kids. Had you passed through a portal that day, too? Had those girls been yours? You place a hand on your belly the way you did when you were twenty-five and full of hope at seeing those lines pop up on that test, and you foolishly thought that you and John would have a long, exciting life together. Cue the happy women on the commercials, unsuspecting or deluded about all that could come as a result of a positive test—tooth loss, melasma, gestational diabetes, preeclampsia (resulting in a stroke that could immobilize you in a permanent birthing position), even death, in childbirth or before, if you were especially unlucky, like Laci Peterson or Adriana Smith.
John had the thickest, darkest hair you’d ever seen on anyone (which would explain your twins’ hair), and you hope his ass is bald now, or, better yet, dead. When you told him you were pregnant, he responded that super-moms got it done on their own every day, and you would, too. Because why would he want to raise a kid with somebody he’d met at a clothing-optional club, who had slept with him approximately forty-five minutes into knowing him? Was he not aware that he’d slept with you, too? Or that he was the one who’d said he loved you first, like, the third time you saw each other? Had he forgotten that? Or that by the second week of the relationship he had all but moved into your uptown shotgun? No one you knew would have approved, but you didn’t really talk to your family, and you had mostly cut your friends off. You didn’t want to have to explain to them that you saw nothing wrong with being up front about your desires. Did the speed with which it had happened discount the love you’d made? The months of playful codependence you’d cultivated? Because the two of you had met naked, there was nothing unrevealed, right? In the movies and in fairy tales, nobody was penalized for falling in love at first sight.
The truth was that not everything had been revealed. About yourself, but especially about him. Like the fact that he was the type to circle your house for weeks, as if you wouldn’t recognize that rickety truck from a mile away, knowing how it had rocked on its poor shocks just from the motion of you making love in it. And that he was the type to repeatedly dump trash in your strip of yard and spray-paint “Baby Killer” on the side of your car, as if he himself hadn’t also decided to abandon the kid. He was egocentric and vindictive, totally unreasonable, but what did you expect from a March Aries? You decided to avoid the whole sign from then on. But, still, you could not turn off your desire for him, for his body and his danger. You bought your first gun and went back and forth between wanting to blow his brain loose or yours. Even more than a year later, after you’d got a therapist, you’d toyed with the idea of offing yourself and him because the relationship had been the abrupt end of your naïveté. It was like he’d invited you into paradise and then pushed you right back out and slammed the door on your heels.
John had been your first heartbreak, the one that let you know that love could exist for you only if you did it “right,” which meant being secretive about yourself and your desires, and being rigid and full of rules, lacking in spontaneity. Your rightness would earn you a compressed, airless, spiky situation, like the one your parents had. John Doe, whose real name you had vowed never to utter again, had made you understand the edge in your mother’s voice when you asked her how to know if you were in love. The weary way she’d shaken her head at your question had you feeling as if you’d failed a big test.
“What’s love,” she’d said, “but a secondhand emotion?”
Your mother would know. In high school, she’d been voted the Kindest Girl, and it seemed to you that she had been determined to live up to that for the rest of her life, no matter how badly other people treated her. She’d had six children for your father, who was a hard man at best but had been hell on wheels since your older brother died. Every time your mother calls, you hope that she wants to tell you not how faithfully she’s taking care of him but that he’s finally lost his battle with misery.
You wipe your face on your T-shirt again, grateful that you chose a dark one for today’s run. Using the back of the bench to steady yourself, you stand and try to jog again, but your legs won’t coöperate. So you sit back down where you were, but turn your eyes to the spot where you saw the day open up and swallow your son. You recall that your first need after releasing him in that dorm bathroom had been rest and that then, when you finally rose, you wanted meat. The poet had had all sorts of dietary restrictions that you’d followed along with him, and, when you were done with all that, your body craved flesh. You got a steak and ate it to the bone, fat and all.
You think of the third time, the embryo created with your ex-husband, whom you’d married because he was a dentist you met at one of those Black-folks-in-white-coats events, and you thought that made him a good man. He was the one you got for being right, a man you showed off to all of your family and friends, but whom Kiki advised you to reconsider. Not only had he not been able to help you come, he had often stood in the way of your arrival. Yet, at the time, you were still excited about being pregnant for him. Then came the day when you were tired and hungry after puking your guts up all morning trying to grow his legacy, and he wouldn’t give you, his pregnant wife, a piece of the big goofy Scooby-Doo-ass sandwich he was eating. Why would you want to be bound to a greedy, selfish Taurus like that? What else would he decide to withhold from you? And how much would you be willing to accept to keep it together for the kids? In the end, his sheer inattention to your pleasure was what made the decision for you. You think your mother probably has never had an orgasm, but you would not dare ask.
The last time happened after a friends-with-benefits situation, with an extremely buck August Leo who was in his late twenties, ten years younger than you. He was in E.M.S., so fresh-faced and energetic. Well, that had occurred for several reasons. Because you deserved all the pleasure after your ex-husband. Because 8 p.m. is the longest hour. Because you were no longer young, and you knew you’d never pass that way again. Because you wanted to feel the vigor, but you didn’t want to pay for wanting to feel the vigor. Because how many morning-after pills could you pop without experiencing some of the stated side effects? And, of course, because you had paused your therapy for a minute in order to justify making questionable decisions.
If you could sum up your reasoning for it all, you’d say you were irresponsible. Ask the forty-three houseplants you killed over the years, or Clyde, the dog you let loose to play at the park and forgot, never to be seen again. If you want to go deep, you could say that life is a wild, silly ride when you’re out here yearning as hard as you were. Certainly, you didn’t want to pass that yearning on to your babies; nor did you want to deliver to them the traits that you yourself couldn’t control. Like your mother’s complacency, which was probably buried in your gene code somewhere. Or the poet’s haplessness or your husband’s nonchalance. Or perhaps it was because on this time line you chose yourself; over and over, you chose you. You’d be remiss, however, if you didn’t mention how much you adore babies (pediatrics was your second-favorite rotation), and you respect kids’ right to be and thrive, so you reject regenerative A.I. and minimize your consumption; you thrift and reuse and hope that the planet won’t burn them alive. You have always loved the idea of being a grandparent, but to have and to hold a kid of your own is the scary part. Then again, perhaps all of these are just excuses—monuments to nothingness, as you’ve been taught—and perhaps you are simply a callous woman, a freak, a murderer. Your mind returns to the steak, perfectly seasoned, and then the melody you heard that brought you to this moment. If the Quarter has nothing, it has songs, floating from everywhere, raw, tender notes that a heart knows it has to hear and forget.
“I’m back,” a voice says.
“Who are you?” you snap but immediately regret it.
It’s the guy from earlier. He is not so much handsome as stunning because of his size, more than six feet tall and large and sturdy, the John Henry type that can pick you up like a Folgers cup. You shiver with the possibilities.
“Can I join you?”
Your answer is halfway between a nod and a shrug, which he takes as a yes. He is a working man, but his smell is unexpectedly soapy and cool. He lands beside you, his weight shifting the bench; it is a weight to be buried under, to squirm beneath.
“You’re the fancy type,” he says.
“Fancy where?” you ask, pinching the drenched T-shirt off your belly. “A fancy mess, maybe.”
“I’ve been in and out of that building repeatedly,” he says. “And, even though I been watching you sit on this bench talking to yourself, you been posed up so elegant, like a ballerina. It ain’t what you have on, baby girl. It’s your aurora.”
You start to correct him but decide against it, getting caught up in the journey you’ve taken from “ma’am” to “baby girl.” It makes you want to take him home, drink until your legs are putty, and be put through the mattress, but you remember what your therapist has told you: that, likely due to the harshness of your childhood discipline, your gauge for safety needs recalibration.
“Here, it’s coconut water,” he says, handing you something cold. “You probably lost plenty of electrolytes out here.”
You check the seal and look for pinholes.
“It came right from the store over there,” he says. “I ain’t that type.”
Deeming it O.K., you crack the carton open, sip, and then down it. There is a hint of mango, your favorite.
“I told you,” he says. “You want another?”
When you finish the second, he asks your name. You scramble and then decide on one.
“Roxanne,” you say. “Roxanne Miller.”
“Well, Ms. Miller, I’m Tory Ingram.”
“You don’t look like a Tory,” you tell him. “You look like a Vernon or an O’Neal.”
You say this without considering the fact that you yourself are not a Roxanne. Tory’s expression flickers, then settles.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
You intended it as a compliment—his name seems flimsy in comparison to his build, his presence. But you don’t think he’ll take that explanation well, so you say nothing. You silently admire his hands, scarred and large, and think of how they might feel on you.
“Are you dangerous?”
He cracks his big, hollow-sounding knuckles, a gesture that seems to you unnecessarily dramatic. His look is far off, and then he returns his focus to you.
“What good is a man that’s not?” he says. Then, “So, are you married?”
You say you are not married, have no kids.
“How did that happen?” he asks, genuinely stumped.
“A divorce and plenty of abortions,” you say, “and it’s funny you ask because I thought I saw one of them today, my first. He walked right past me and disappeared. I mean he looked like me and the father and everything. That’s why I been sitting here. I can’t tell what’s what.”
Tory/O’Neal scoffs. “And you ask if I’m dangerous? You sound psychotic.”
“I’m not psychotic. My heart told me it was my son.”
“Then why didn’t you run after him? Why didn’t you say something?”
You ask what would have been the right words. He is quiet for a minute, but you can tell he is thinking; his brow furrows, and his hand grasps your knee the way someone would to brace you for bad news.
He says, “You’re a serial killer. You’re seeing ghosts because your body is a cemetery.”
You ask his birthday, figuring he has to be a Virgo.
“You not about to try to analyze me with that demonic zodiac mess,” he says.
You laugh and snort at the same time. There will be no squirming tonight. “Where are your kids?” you ask. “Are you married?”
“My kids are with their moms, good women,” he says.
The word “good” comes out with a boom, of course, with the implication that you are not included in this number. It is your turn to scoff. But, of course, he wouldn’t understand. A man is a hero if he manages not to piss on the toilet seat.
“So, I guess I’m not ‘baby girl’ anymore,” you say.
He wags his head, further signalling his disgust. “Do you not wonder who will take care of you when you’re old? Who’s going to wipe your butt?”
You wonder why you are selfish for not wanting kids, except under the most ideal circumstances, but he is not selfish for thinking he’s entitled to have his kids wipe his old ass. You say maybe you will adopt.
You are brought to your senses, this time by squawking and the rapid beating of wings. Tory/O’Neal has left. You are alone on the bench. Nearby, pigeons are fighting over what, horrifyingly, appears to be a chicken strip. A beautiful thing happens in the scuffle: feathers float and land on your shoe. You scoop them up. Good luck, you think, and jump to your feet. The sudden movement sends the birds fluttering away from you, to watch and wait. You unbutton the pocket of your sweats and place the feathers inside. You smell soap, and your day flashes before your eyes, and you feel good, as if your confession and sweat have cleansed you, and you can quit therapy again. Unnecessarily dramatically, you shuffle a little in place and then bounce off one foot and into an easy jog. You are a little more than three miles from home, and there are several different routes you could take. If you head down toward the river, there will be music, and, if you go toward Bourbon, there will be music, too. ♦
2026-03-08 18:06:01
In your story “The City Is a Graveyard,” a woman in her forties goes for a run in New Orleans in August, and sees a man she instinctively believes is a child she miscarried years before. How did this idea come to you?
The French Quarter is a place that always induces a fuguelike headspace for me. I love the Quarter and visit frequently; one day, I was there, under the influence of a cannabis gummy (Don’t do drugs, kids!) and looked down the very alley I describe in the story, and the idea just came to me.
In the course of the story, the woman relives several terminated pregnancies from her past, which means also reliving the relationships that produced them. None of the men she’s been involved with, not even the one she married, would have made good fathers—or long-term partners. Has she had bad luck, or has she been drawn to the wrong men?
I personally believe that most long-term relationships with cis-gendered straight men involve the women having a healthy dose of delusion, self-sacrifice, and conformity to the point of deformity. This is suggested by the fact that married men live longer than single men. The bar is low when it comes to men and parenting, as well. I’ve met men who are considered good fathers who don’t know their kids’ clothing sizes and birthdays, etc. I do know that there are men who are both good fathers and good partners, but the reality is that, under the patriarchy, cis-gendered straight men are socialized into a sort of tunnel-visioned self-centeredness that makes it difficult for them to be adequate in love.
For each of the men, the character gives a zodiac sign and a birth month. One man makes her decide to swear off his sign completely. Do you share her belief that astrology can tell you enough about a person to base that kind of decision on it?
Astrology has been informing humans for thousands of years; it would be hubris for me to say there’s nothing to it. My sun sign is Aries, and I feel that the characteristics of the sign fit who I am and how I move in the world. I don’t, however, believe astrology to be an excuse for human behavior or a reason to discriminate against a group of people—except Scorpios. (Just kidding!)
The character expresses strong sexual desire and refuses to be shamed for it. And she has paid a price for that: she has had to distance herself from her family and many of her friends. Do you think that her social community is particularly judgmental in this way, or would this be true no matter where she lived in the U.S.?
I think it would be true no matter where she lived in the U.S. A woman who demands and exercises agency over her own body has always been scorned and feared.
The title of the story has many possible interpretations. The woman is told that because she has had abortions her body is a cemetery. What makes you apply that to New Orleans as a whole?
New Orleans is a small city that feels crowded. I believe that’s due to the fact that most of the dead are interred above ground because of the water table and the potential for the deceased to rise in a flood. Also, the cemeteries are major tourist attractions. That said, the history of the city is palpable. It’s a place where you feel the past and present at the same time. If you go into Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, you feel as though Jean Lafitte could walk out at any minute in a leather apron. The spirits are all around here. You see the shadows they cast. You sense their weight. The city is a graveyard.
Why did you choose to tell this story in the second person, rather than first or third?
I initially tried the story in both first and third person, but neither resonated for me. Ultimately, I decided on the second person for a few reasons. One: I wanted to challenge myself, having never written in the second person before. Two: I wanted readers to be unable to avert their eyes when reading the story. Three: I knew that this character would be intensely judged by most, so using the second person was a way to put readers in her shoes, whether they liked it or not. ♦
2026-03-08 04:06:02
The nineteenth-century Italian aristocrat Virginia Oldoini, Countess de Castiglione, has been cast in many lights: narcissist, courtesan, spy, exhibitionist. In the photo studio of Mayer & Pierson, she played all these parts and one more—the role of self-portraitist. For decades, Oldoini helped conceptualize and starred in more than four hundred portraits so experimental and expressive that they have drawn comparisons to works by Claude Cahun and Cindy Sherman.
Oldoini was born in Florence, in 1837, just two years before the announcement of a new photographic medium: the daguerreotype. In 1854, at sixteen, she married the twenty-eight-year-old Count de Castiglione; the following spring, they had a son, Georgio, and she had her first documented extramarital affair. Near the end of 1855, the family moved to Paris. The move involved some diplomatic intrigue: present-day Italy was then a patchwork of independent states, and Oldoini’s cousin, the politician Camillo Benso, Count di Cavour, tasked her with promoting Italian unification at Napoleon III’s court. It seems to have been clear to di Cavour that, no matter what happened, Oldoini could not be ignored.
“Never have I seen such a beauty, and never again will I see one like her,” Princess Pauline Metternich recalled in a memoir. Oldoini arrived late at events so as to make a grand entrance. When she went to the theatre, audiences would allegedly stand and applaud at the sight of Oldoini in her box. “She is the queen of beauty, poise, and grace, and when she arrives, she looks like Venus strolling by,” gushed the fashion journal Le Bon Ton. At one summer soirée, in 1856, the countess and the French Emperor spent a long time alone on an island in a lake. By winter, their affair was common knowledge.
It would be easy to conclude, given her beauty, her status, her wealth, and her admirers, that Oldoini’s portraits were solely an exercise in vanity, another attribute that she unquestionably possessed. Perhaps that was what first brought her to the studio of Mayer & Pierson, on the chic Boulevard des Capucines, in July of 1856. But unlike the studio’s other aristocratic models, Oldoini went on to collaborate with Pierre-Louis Pierson for close to forty years.
In the early portraits, she appears stiff, or coolly coquettish. (Her appearance was once described as possessing a “cold fire.”) She projects confidence in front of the camera, perhaps in part because this was at the height of her reign as the ne-plus-ultra beauty of Paris. In early 1857, she attended a ball dressed as the Queen of Hearts—a rather on-the-nose costume choice. Hearts radiated from her headpiece to her hem, with a single heart placed near her pelvis. (Napoleon’s wife, the Empress Eugénie de Montijo, purportedly commented that the heart was a little low.)
But hearts are fickle. In the spring of 1857, Oldoini was banished from court, following speculation that she was involved in an assassination attempt on Napoleon, which took place as he left her residence. Oldoini separated from her husband and moved to the outskirts of Turin, where she lamented to a visitor, “My life has barely begun and already my role is over.”
Oldoini returned to Paris, and to the photo studio, in the eighteen-sixties. Italy had unified in 1861, and whatever diplomatic position she had once held was gone. In photos from this period, it appears as if she wants to remind herself of her now tenuous importance. For one portrait, she dressed in the Queen of Hearts costume from five years earlier; the photo was the basis for an elaborate, painted-over image, a fantasy dreamed up by Oldoini and executed by Aquilin Schad, an artist in Pierson’s studio. In it, she stands in a leafy bower and gazes at the viewer, lifting her skirt slightly to reveal a dainty, heart-emblazoned shoe.
The eighteen-sixties were Oldoini’s most photographically productive decade. In another series from the period, she appears dressed as the Queen of Etruria. She had worn this outfit to a costume ball in 1863, after which the press, having confused her with another guest, reported that she had been nearly nude. The images were a refutation—and a response to her husband, who believed the reports and threatened to take their son, Georgio. Oldoini sent him some photographs, including one in which she held a dagger, titled “La Vengeance.”
In her most famous image, Oldoini holds an oval frame to her eye, through which she peers knowingly. A frame within a frame, an eye meeting a lens—if Oldoini had been born in the early twentieth century, she might have given the Surrealists a run for their money.
Oldoini shared her images with friends and family, but only once agreed to sell a portrait, for charity. In this image, she wears an austere costume that she conceived after the Etruria debacle—that of the Hermit of Passy, which just barely reveals her face, set in an expression of stony contempt. In 1867, she agreed to have the painted-over Queen of Hearts portrait displayed at the Exposition Universelle, although she reportedly wanted to be listed as the artist. Her request was denied.
Oldoini’s last series of portraits were made in the eighteen-nineties. By this time, the scope of her life had contracted. She was already widowed when her son died of smallpox in 1879, at the age of twenty-four. In the eighteen-seventies, she commissioned a postmortem photograph of her beloved terrier Kasino. In her will, she specified that her two embalmed dogs should lie in her coffin under her feet, like little furry footstools. Along with her other stipulations, this was ignored.
The commentary around Oldoini’s last decade is awash with mythology and more than a little misogyny. (“When Fairy Queens Become Witches,” read one headline about her, in 1914.) Some claimed that her mental health had deteriorated. Others described her dimly lit apartment as being draped in black velvet, with mirrors either shrouded or forbidden entirely, and said that Oldoini walked her dogs only at night and with her face veiled. In these stories, she comes across as a Norma Desmond type, transfixed by her own former glories.
Whether or not these accounts were accurate, Oldoini’s expression in portraits from this time seems more vacant, her eyebrows heavily drawn. In some images, she wears her old, now threadbare costumes. One disturbing image shows her legs and feet—body parts that she had once so audaciously photographed—with the perspective shifted, so that it looks like she’s in a coffin, buried alive with her camera, as if she was aware that her prescient, obsessive self-documentation would long outlive her.
